Site Slowdowns

We’ve been getting enormous amounts of traffic lately, and it has caused my server to bump up against the memory limit, which kills scripts and makes the site slow way, way down or stop working. Yesterday, there was also a database failure on the server, which only compounded things. Amazingly, despite the site being down a few times yesterday, we had more traffic than any single day other than back when PMAFT’s scifi post went viral and was linked all over the place. It seems that The Spearhead is starting to become fairly widely known and recognized, as the traffic has been growing faster and faster over the last couple months.

I’ve raised the memory resources (nearly doubling them), and that seems to have fixed the problem. Only thing is, I’ll have to go back and lower the resources again when the traffic subsides because extra memory costs extra $$. I don’t like changing the memory all the time, because it’s a pain, but fortunately I found a program that can do it for me, like a faithful little robot, so I’ll be installing that and we can avoid traffic interruptions even when I’m sound asleep or otherwise away from the desk.

So if you find the site slow or unresponsive, it’s just growing pains and means that there are tons of people reading the site — once things stabilize again and we find a sweet spot with memory resource allocation things ought to smooth out.